Friday, 12 October 2012

One perfect day

It begins with waking up at 8am instead of 4.30am, as it's been for the last three weeks, and then walking barefoot along the beach to breakfast, on sand showing the prints only of lizards and birds. And it's spending the day out on the WMBL (world's most beautiful lagoon) on a calm day with scattered clouds and the sea so blue and so turquoise and so many shades in between that you'd need a colour chart to name them - and, indeed, the last time I did the Aitutaki Lagoon Cruise, I brought some along for that very purpose: "...the colour of the water is Mint Tulip deepening into Riptide with a band of Curious Blue under an Oxymoron sky..." We even had some BPs (beautiful people) along today, for focal points.

Leo was our Captain/Cook again, having jumped ship from the competitors, but still making the same jokes (viz. captain/cook) and whipping up a mean barbecued tuna and wahoo with bananas feast for our lunch after a morning of cruising, snorkelling and swimming. There were huge (friendly) trevally in the water, plenty of smaller colourful fish to fail to get in the frame of the underwater camera with its fatal digital delay, and the water was brilliantly warm and clear. We were dropped off on the sandbar beside One Foot Island to walk and wade our way across to where we ate surrounded by begging chickens and chicks, before doing some slothful wallowing in the water and then heading home again.

Leo's been doing the job for nearly 20 years and is a bit tired of it, frankly. He tried to break away and get a job in a petrol station instead, but it didn't work out and he's ended up back spending his days cruising across the lagoon, frying fish in a thatched hut and plinking away at a ukulele while the guests eat. Rough.

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